For the Doom & Drone Lovers: Nonsun

We’ve been vocal on this site about our love of metal and it’s various subgenres. But sometimes, you just land on a band that makes you excited about music.

A random bandcamp search led me to Nonsun. Digging through various tags, looking for a couple interesting bands to include in that round of album reviews in The Beachcomber, I found a new favorite: A Ukrainian doom/drone/sludge band.

Goatooth – vocalist, guitarist, and bassist of the band – answered a few questions about Nonsun.

What was your first experience with doom or non-mainstream metal?
The first doom band I listened to was Black Sabbath, though at the time I wasn’t aware it was doom. The first one that I actually knew was labeled as doom was Paradise Lost.

How did the name Nonsun come about?
Before Nonsun I had a death-doom metal project called Negative Plus which had a song titled “Under the Non-Sun”. I think the name Nonsun is quite versatile for understanding and interpretations, from phonetic resemblance to ‘nonsense’ to interpretation of the ‘sun’ as a symbol or a god to some kind of an image that comes from our music and even to its affiliation with drone doom, if you know what I mean.

Are you currently in any other projects?
Yes, I’m currently on vocals in a death-doom band Apostate and Alpha is playing drums in 2 blues-rock projects apart from Nonsun.

What are your hopes for Nonsun moving forward?
At the moment we’re working on new material and up to now we have about 30 minutes of new music. So we still need at least another 30 minutes and that would be sufficient for our debut full-length album. Another hope is to become able to play live. There are some technical and human factors that we still need to get over to accomplish this.

Favorite underground bands?
They change from time to time. For the moment I’d name Kodiak, Horseback, Black Boned Angel, Nadja. Not sure where the ‘undergroundness’ begins and ends though.

Nonsun is a mix of several sub-genres of metal – do you have a way you prefer to label the music you create?
I would label it drone in the form of doom metal. Or droned-out sludgy doom. Or low slow heavy atmospheric music.

What would you say to someone to encourage them to listen to doomy-type bands with an open mind?
Honestly, I don’t think someone can be encouraged to listen to a certain kind of music, especially to such a specific genre as doom. You gotta feel the need for it. Most people just want to have fun off their music and they seek the shortest and easiest way. Not many would dive deeper into the disgusting unknown and go through all those stages of catharsis. So I think one should have a specific attitude, a state of mind, a mood in order to be able to perceive those doomy-type sounds. And, as you mentioned, an open mind. And, of course, be born too late